Art Spotlight: Gregory vrs Quixl Combat Loop

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello Sketchfab artists! I’m Thomas Schafer, an animator and technical artist currently working with Games Foundry on a city builder/adventure game called Folk Tale. Shortly after my friend Allan (the artist responsible for the beautiful character models) introduced me to Sketchfab I realized it would be a great way for showing off animation examples and communicating ideas.

As both an animator and a fan of old Kung Fu movies, I die a little inside each time I have to limit my animation work to the, “heavy hit, light hit, melee idle, etc.” that is the usual standard in video games. I’ve always enjoyed the more complex, choreographed motions that you see in movies, but are rarely seen in video games. I wanted to create a more cinematic way for heroes to engage each other in combat, and set out to create a system of characters with interchangeable combat looping animations. Communicating an idea like this to a development team can be a difficult task, but Sketchfab is the perfect tool for the job.

My weapons of choice for this endeavor will be Autodesk Maya and Motion Builder. I often create the more complex character rigs in Maya, but I prefer Motion Builders animation tool set. I tend to bounce back and forth between the two, with the final product being cleaned up and exported from Maya as an FBX.

“Gregory vrs Quixl Combat Loop” is just the first of a series of animations using this combat looping system. Eventually I plan to add many more characters and animations to the system and I invite anyone who is interested to follow along with me.